Excel Charting Utility Giveaway

Last week, you had a chance to win John Walkenbach’s new book – 101 Excel 2013 Tips, Tricks & Timesavers, thanks to Katie Mohr at Wiley. Thanks for all your comments – those were great tips! And the winning entry, chosen in a random draw, in Excel, of course, is:

Congratulations Neil! After Katie sends an email to Neil, he has 24 hours to claim the prize. If not claimed, we’ll go to the next name in the randomly sorted list.

This Week’s Giveaway – Excel Chart Utility

This week, you’ll have a chance to win Jon Peltier’s time-saving and feature-packed Excel Chart Utility, which includes a Waterfall chart builder, along with 7 other custom chart types. If you build charts, this tool can save you countless hours.

For example, to build a Waterfall chart, you just select your data, click the Waterfall Chart command on the Ribbon, set a few options, and click OK, and your waterfall chart is ready. It even works if the total values are negative, as you can see in the example below.

Charting Tools and More

In addition to the 8 custom charts, there are 6 useful charting tools.

There is a data tool too, and 3 general tools, to make your Excel work easier.

I try to track various things for our end users, and especially various utility charges. I think a waterfall chart would be the best graphic conveyer of the fluctuating usage, and I’d love to try to create one that not only compares each month but also same month year over year to highlight aberrations.

I would find the option to export the chart as an image file very handy. I do a lot of presentations and often need a static chart on the slides. This feature will allow me to export a charts easily and later add them to the presentation when designing it. Another option I would find useful is the Quick XY Chart although its the labeling of the chart that is important. I’m not sure if Jon’s add-in includes the labeling, but I’m sure the feature will be great.

I’d certainly use the waterfall chart and boxplot utilities the most. I know how to create them manually, but that process is a real pain in the backside if you have to do it often. I would love to have a tool to simplify this!

Box plots. We use them all the time as we analyze assessment-to-sales ratios by neighborhood under multiple scenarios. Very, very useful! It would save us from using our stats package and being faced with “inflexible” box plots.

The Waterfall Chart is absolutely perfect for variance analysis between budgeted items and actual items. I’ve spent a bit of time following Jon’s instructions for creating one but I haven’t mastered it; if I had it, I would have to do less thinking and more working.

A waterfall chart in a just a couple of keyboard clicks…..That’s awesome…I’ll definitely use that. Not to mention Cluster Stack and Box Plot will be extremely useful for me too. Amazing tool. Great job to the creators.

I would most likely try to find an application for each distinct utility, but the main one that comes to mind is the waterfall chart. I currently create manual charts to “bridge” the gap between actual and plan activity on a monthly basis. I’m sure this utility would greatly simplify the process.

I’d use the waterfalls most for tracking stock incoming, outgoing, sold, brought, total etc which is something i already have to do for monthly reports but this would save me quite a bit of time and finally allow me to get rid of the cheat tab i have to include as a template to build it from

I discovered the Jon Peltier’s website two years ago. And I love the charting techniques teach in the site.
Particularly, XY Chart with the quick label function is the most useful tool for my daily works which very often requires me to plot the scatter chart for some regression results.